Stateside: Wednesday, April 8, 2026

From Michigan Public, this is stateside. I'm April Bear. Today, new findings from MSU about PFAC's effect on the human immune system. A large percentage of Michiganers have private wells. If you have a private well, you are responsible for testing for water. Also, a new book chronicles what's happened as Michigan and other states opened the door to legal sports gambling. Michigan is a good... state as far as foreshadowing what other states could be in for. I'd say the tax revenue has not been quite as substantial as you might hope. And on it's just politics, one state representative talks about the very slow pace of work at Michigan State Capitol. It seems to always be a disconnect. Unfortunately, I think some politicians are tracing the Fox News headlines or the national headlines and the people that are really paying that price to the people here at home. Those stories coming up today on state side. Welcome to stateside. I'm April Bear. Later this hour, one state lawmaker has a candid conversation with us about the pace of work in Lansing these days. It's just politics sits down with alabas far hot later this hour. But first, many Michigan communities have so-called forever chemicals, a class we refer to as PFAS present in their drinking water. And there's no question that this is a huge problem. The state legislature has greenlit funding across state agencies to identify and address PFAS hotspots. But our scientific knowledge of PFAS and human and animal health, still has some substantial gaps in it. But there's some new research this week out of Michigan State University that finds that exposure to PFS is weakening our immune systems when it's present. My guest today is Courtney Kerrigan. She's an environmental health researcher at MSU and senior author of this new study. And she's joining us to talk about her work. Courtney, welcome to stateside. Thanks for having me. This has obviously been a topic of scientific interest for some time now. I wonder if you could just give us a little background about how you got interested in this particular set of chemicals. So I was working in environmental health. I had training in... environmental epidemiology and exposure science and I was working on flame retardant exposures in my postdoc in Boston but I was living in New Hampshire which is where I'm from and the community that was sort of adjacent to where I was living had found PFAS chemicals in drinking water um at what we would now consider relatively high levels. At the time, there was a lot of, you know, it's not too bad, don't worry about it, kind of framing. And one of the women in the community who actually turned out to be my neighbor, I really wanted to get her children's blood tested for PFAS. And so I started sharing information with her about PFAS because my doctoral advisor had worked on this really large...

PFS epidemiology study in West Virginia around the DuPont PFS contamination. And then I just got pulled in from looking up PFS ever since because it's a huge issue. It was sort of at the beginning of when military bases were starting to test. So this base in particular in New Hampshire, P's former Air Force base, which is now P's trade port. was one of the first to test. Another one of the first to discover PFAS contamination in military base is here in Michigan and Oscoda at the former Ward Smith Air Force Base. Right. I wonder, could you give us a thumbnail of what research has been able to establish maybe prior to when you started this study, what we know about exposure and human health? Well, we know that. There's a group of PFAS I'm going to call legacy PFAS, right? So these include the ones that we're talking about in our new study. These were phased out over a decade ago now. These are the ones that were commonly testing foreign drinking water, testing foreign blood. They're very persistent. We know that they're toxic. They bio-cumulate in the body. We know enough to know that we don't want to have exposure to them. So we do know a lot about the health effects of legacy PFS. We know that they affect multiple systems of the body, that they have been linked to certain cancers, including testicular and kidney cancer and likely even breast cancer. They increase cholesterol. They disrupt hormone levels, including thyroid hormone. They are known immunotoxicant. So most of what we know about the immunotoxicity of these PFAS are from animal studies in rodents primarily and in studies of children. So birth cohort studies where we enroll a mother and then follow the child, you know, through childhood. And we can use the childhood vaccination.

as a sort of marker of their immune function. And that's what we were doing in this study, but we are doing it in adults because typically this kind of analysis does not work well in adults because you have seen, your body has seen most types of pathogens, flu, virus. But the COVID-19 pandemic, the reason we were all, you know, trying to avoid getting COVID is because our bodies hadn't seen it before. And so if you hadn't had COVID and then you get the vaccine, that's the first time your body is seeing. that and having this immune response. And so then we're able to measure that much better in an adult than we would otherwise. We're all very familiar with the term novel virus now because of having gone through that experience. And it's not hard to understand why that might be an important point in this kind of immunological study. Since you were trying to establish what PFAS exposure does to our immune systems, can you talk a little bit about how you set up this research? Yeah, so we were already doing a study in a community in Michigan that had PFAS contamination discovered in the drinking water a few years prior. And the communities that we worked with that we work with know about the immune effects of PFAS and we're concerned that they may be more susceptible to getting COVID, getting more severe COVID, having higher rates of mortality from COVID. And so this was a question that was important to them. So we added it on to the study. Scientifically, it was very interesting to me because the literature for looking at this kind of immune function test in adults is really murky. And we think that has to do with this limitation of not having a novel, you know, vaccine, novel. challenge that you're measuring. And so, you know, I was curious to see if we could design this in a way that it would, that you would actually be able to see this signal in an adult. And we did. The results showed that people who were in the study did produce fewer protective antibodies when their immune systems had been exposed to PFAS and encountered a new virus. Can you give us a sense of the scale, Courtney? I mean, how much? How dampened, I guess, was the immune response in what you saw in results? I think from a clinical perspective, it was small. If you saw that reduction in an individual, you know, most doctors probably wouldn't be concerned. But when you see that on a population level, you know, we're interpreting that.

differently, right? We're interpreting that as, well, we can see this effect on the immune system. And so on a population level, that means that you're going to shift more people into the amino, you know. the category of not having enough immune response or being more likely to get sick more frequently. So in studies of children, you do see higher rates of fever and infection among children who have higher exposures to PFAS. Do we know why PFAS affects human immune systems in the ways that it does? We do not have a good understanding of the mechanism. We know that PFS are have this unique property of having one side that is attracted to water and the other side that repels it. That's what gives them their function, makes them useful. And they're also very persistent that carbon fluorine bond that characterizes a PFS is very, very strong and it doesn't break easily in the environment or in our bodies. And so we think that these are the properties that are causing this sort of. effects that we see in the human body. But we don't specifically know exactly what mechanism is causing these immune effects. So coming out of this paper, what further questions do you have on your mind going forward? Well, I think first, you know, I want the scientific community to understand. Don't try to do this study in adults. Or if you're looking at the literature, I want people to understand that. You really need to know the limitation of the study that you're doing and understand it well so that you can interpret it appropriately. Moving forward, when we're looking at PFS, we're looking at two ongoing crises in a sense, right? One is how do we deal with legacy PFS and the fact that these are widespread in drinking water, very difficult and expensive to clean up? There's a huge cost that goes along with that, but we also have done a really good job, I think, of quantifying the human cost, the cost to health, and then even the economic effect. or the economic cost of those health effects. So there are some really interesting studies that have quantified this. And then the other crisis that's ongoing at the same time is the current use PFAS concerns, right? We have hundreds of other types of PFAS chemicals that have similar properties, have the potential to... cause harm in the body in a similar way. A lot of them are precursors, so they transform into the more harmful PFS. They're usually in complex mixtures in products and in the environment. And so it creates this real challenge for scientists who are trying to very quickly try to quantify the health effects of large number of chemicals. And suddenly the science has gotten much more difficult. So PFHXS in our study is a really good biomarker.

this legacy PFOS because it's so persistent in the body, it takes eight years for half of what's in your body now to be eliminated, that makes for a really good biomarker of exposure. So we can do our research really well. When you've got a big mixture of a whole bunch of other chemicals that don't have a single really good biomarker, it makes epidemiology studying in humans in this way much more difficult. It becomes much murkier. So I kind of think about epidemiology as sort of a blunt tool when we're doing this kind of research. If you see something and you also see it in animals, you should take it really seriously. So we have this challenge of... We've got a legacy issue that we're trying to deal with at the same time that we're trying to deal with the tap still being on for all these chemicals that we do not know for certain are safe or that are safe in the mixtures and the levels that we are continuously being exposed to. Courtney Kerrigan is an environmental health researcher at Michigan State University, and she's talking to us about research that her team published this week. Courtney, thank you so much for your time. Thank you for having me. We're going to take a short break now. When we get back, some fascinating stories explaining how legal sports gambling exploded in Michigan and across the United States. Michigan is a good... state as far as foreshadowing what other states could be in for. I'd say the tax revenue has not been quite as substantial as you might hope. That's just ahead. You're with stateside. This is stateside. I'm April Bear. On Monday night, all eyes were on the Michigan Wolverines and the national title game for NCAA men's college basketball. But what happens after that big game is over? And the betters who overindulged find themselves regretting what they wagered and jonesing for a win. Legal sports gambling has exploded in Michigan and across the United States over the past decade, with action moving out of in-person betting parlors and onto mobile devices. Every month, hundreds of millions of dollars of bets are made in our state, and that's just counting the sports books that are based in Michigan. At the same time, calls to the state's problem gambling helpline have surged. Danny Fund is a reporter and editor who's based in Charlotte, North Carolina, and he's just published a new book called Everybody Loses, The Tumultuous Rise of American Sports Gambling. Our state played a substantial role in his research, and he's visiting a bookstore in Ann Arbor this Thursday night. Danny Fund, welcome to stateside. It's so great to have you. My pleasure. Thank you. Betting has become so universal now that...

I felt like I had my work cut out for me just finding reporting and research on how much wager money was changing hands during the tournament this year. Every single search I tried. I was getting stories, quote unquote, about betting lines. And not just from sports books. ESPN, a lot of people know, has incorporated sports betting and a lot of its reporting, but also Sports Illustrated USA Today and even the New York Times all had tournament stories. On betting, has anyone not incorporated gambling into their coverage of sports at this point? That's a good question. I think there's a handful of newspapers that have resisted those formal partnerships, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, a few legacy magazines like The Atlantic, the New Yorker. But it's a lot easier to come up with those examples than to list the dozens and dozens of dozens that do embrace gambling and make a lot of money off it. And just the way that that influences their coverage is... kind of overwhelming. Yeah. You were looking at the topic of sports betting through the lens of the nation's culture of betting and of sports. And you did a lot, you did a lot of legal reporting on some of the major cases that have got us to where we are right now and the technology. But can you tell us a little bit about how Michigan experiences informed your research? Yes, so Michigan was one of the first states to legalize online sports betting in the aftermath of this landmark 2018 Supreme Court decision that struck down a federal ban on bookmaking. Michigan also was very quick to legalize online casino gambling, which is something a lot of states haven't embraced just because... Basically, all of the issues with sports betting are magnified when you're able to bet on blackjack and roulette and craps from your phone. A lot of states don't like the sound of that. But the industry certainly does. It makes about 10 times as much money. So Michigan is a good state as far as foreshadowing what other states could be in for. I'd say the tax revenue has not been quite as substantial as you might hope. And the fallout is something we're still wrapping our heads around as a lot more people than ever are betting on sports. Yeah. And I think a lot of people probably recognize the changes that this means in the lives of people who bet and have become addicted to betting. But you also make interesting cases for how it's affecting our leagues and our athletes. You tell this story about a guy. who played college basketball in Purdue. His name is Carson Amy Coney Barrett. He's on the coaching staff there now. And in 2024, when Purdue was playing its first round game in the NCAA men's tournament, Amy Coney Barrett scored this really dramatic shot at the buzzer. And the guy was just the hero of the night. It was one of those classic tournament moments. And...

You take us to that scene where he's accepting all the text messages from friends after the game. You know, great shot, man, amazing. And then he turns on his social media. Can you explain what he saw? Absolutely. But first, it was a dramatic sort of storybook sports moment, but only because this guy was a walk-on who had hurt his knee earlier in the season and hardly ever played. So the fact that he gets to swish a three-pointer in the tournament is such a nice reward for someone who was such a selfless teammate the rest of the season. And he was only playing because Purdue was up by more than 20 points. So as you said, back in the locker room, He's looking at messages he's getting. And he notices that on social media, he's just being bombarded with hate mail from people saying the nastiest things like enjoy being a car salesman after you graduate or kill yourself or even words we can't say on the radio. All of that he realized was because that three-pointer he made had caused Purdue to cover the point spread. They were 27-point favorites. He'd made a three that made them go over the spread. And so people who'd bet on Purdue to fail to cover the spread suffered an agonizing defeat. And it sounds like an exceptional story. You know, what are the odds of all that happening? It happens on a game-by-game basis for basically everyone in sports, pro or college. And I spoke with an official at the NCAA about that. And he said that before legalization took off, that kind of harassment from gamblers was like a flickering flame, you know, sort of a nuisance, but something they could keep at bay. And now he said it's like a wildfire burning out of control. I mean, some people would make the case that sports betting has always happened in places like Nevada where sports books were a place that people gather in Las Vegas and elsewhere to watch games and bet. You know, it was kind of one of those classic Good Time Vegas activities that people did and that there was plenty of betting going on under the table. What do you think about the argument that there's a case for bringing? illegal sports betting into the light and getting it above board. I think it's pretty compelling. I think the resonance of that argument for recreational cannabis definitely paved the way in some respects for people seeing the same logic apply to sports betting. The difference is this argument was that we're just going to convert illegal betters into legal ones so we can tax and regulate their wagering. The reality was that we've grown the pool of people gambling dramatically. So many more people are comfortable betting on a app that they can get on the app store and deposit money with Venmo and PayPal and bet on thousands of things you could never wager on before. Then they would be if they had to find a street bookie or use some shady offshore website.

Americans should be allowed to bet on sports or Congress lacks the authority to regulate sports betting or it's now legal to bet in all 50 states. None of that was true. In fact, the court went out of its way to say Congress does have the authority to regulate sports betting. This specific law had just gone about that in a constitutionally defective way. And yet what I found in my reporting is that behind the scenes, As the leagues were fighting in court to preserve this law, they were meeting with representatives of the gambling industry behind closed doors very secretively and being converted into evangelists for gambling. recognizing that gamblers watch a lot of games, and this would boost the value of the TV rights of pro and college sports to the order of billions of dollars. And so once the Supreme Court gave them cover by striking down this federal law, the leagues became very aggressive in lobbying states to say, you know, pass these bills as quickly as possible. The sports books kind of had the leagues at TV rights. Right. Yeah, particularly Major League Baseball, which saw its audience aging, young people not wanting to sit through a four-hour ball game, people canceling cable subscriptions. And so when the gambling industry commissioned studies that found that gamblers watch about two times as many games as the average fan, they also watch till the ends of blowouts to see how their bets play out, that was very appealing to the leagues. And baseball in particular, as I said, Recognize that the leisurely pace of play and the breaks between pitches and batters could actually be an asset if it gives people a chance to be betting constantly during games. And so you fast forward to last year when that comes back to bite them. And one of the top relief pitchers in baseball, a guy named Emmanuel Claucet on the Cleveland Guardians, was indicted for rigging balls and strikes, telling people, hey, I'm going to intentionally throw a ball. when I face this batter, be sure to bet a lot of money on that. That is kind of the nightmare scenario of online betting. And it's, in a sense, quite predictable because when you make it so easy to win hundreds of thousands of dollars on specific pitches, things you could never bet on in the pre-legalization era, that temptation is greater than ever. And people I've been speaking with in sports, said it was inevitable that some athletes would fall prey to that. You talk about some interesting case studies for how different states have handled regulation, although it certainly feels like a Wild West at times. It's not as if states haven't tried to set some parameters. And you talk about how Ohio regulators have tried to backstop some of the excesses in so-called risk-free betting. And I'm putting that in huge air quotes because it's not actually risk-free. Can you explain what Ohio did and how it's working out?

They've taken a hard line from the start, and one of the things they forbid is exactly what you said. These promotions that advertise a risk-free bet sometimes worth thousands of dollars, and you could imagine how appealing that sounds. I could bet three grand and have no risk of losing that money. That sounds like a pretty sweet deal. It persuaded, I think it's safe to say, millions of Americans to sign up for betting accounts. The problem is that a lot of them didn't read the fine print and realize that risk-free has a lot of risk. You can lose all that money. And that infuriates people. It sounds patently deceptive. I heard people in the industry, including at operators like Fandals, say they felt guilty offering that deal, knowing how dishonest it was. And Ohio said, we're not going to tolerate that because they legalized a bit after the first wave of states, including Michigan. And they said, gosh, that's just totally disingenuous and deceptive. They also prohibited sports books from targeting colleges with their marketing. They restricted certain advertising that targets people who are just retail online shoppers. And they said, we don't want you. saying, hey, you've, you know, let's say bought sports merchandise. You can't pitch those people on now betting on sports. And yet, despite taking that incredibly hard line, Governor Mike DeWine of Ohio said recently that his biggest regret in office is signing a sports betting bill. And I've heard a number of other lawmakers in recent years say they have buyer's remorse, that they were rushed into this. And they didn't have time to process the potential consequences. Folks may have heard that our governor, Gretchen Whitmer, recently proposed a tax on legal sports bets, or I should say a higher tax. You've had a chance to study what some states like Illinois have experienced after levying similar taxes on sports betting. Can you talk a little bit about how that's worked out? Yes, Michigan has one of the skimpiest taxes on online sports betting in the country. I think it's about 8.5% after deducting promotions. I think it's worth noting that one of the state legislators, who was instrumental in the Michigan betting bill, is a man named Brant Iden, who soon after accomplishing that went to work for fanatics as their government affairs chief for their sports betting initiatives. Say what you will of that revolving door. But yeah, I think a lot of states are saying, how is it that we've accepted a business that's making money hand over fist and we're making so little off that? When that was one of the main selling points is that this is going to bring in a lot of revenue. So a state like New York taxes online sports betting at 51%. Some states have pushed it up to 30%. I heard from someone who's been in this business for a long time who says, in a place like Nevada that has such a huge economy that generates kind of second degree benefits from gambling, it makes sense to tax gambling in the single digits there. But the fact that so many states have used a Nevada model makes absolutely no sense. It's kind of letting the industry off the hook for...

paying their fair share, especially when you think that states often have to provide a safety net for people who develop gambling addictions and need therapy. That can get extremely expensive. So I think there's a strong case to be made for raising the tax. The industry will say, well, this will just drive people to the black market. But as we discussed, they're already going to the black market for some reasons. What that really ends up creating is a kind of race to the bottom, I think. And when you process that, you might ask, what's the point of even legalizing if we're going to hold legal operators to the same standard as these black market offshore sites? Danny Fund's new book is called Everybody Loses, The Tumultuous Rise of American Sports Gambling. He's making a trip to Michigan this week and will be speaking Thursday night at Litterati Bookstore in Ann Arbor. Danny, thank you so much for talking to us. And thank you for all the research that went into this. Thank you, April. It's been my pleasure. And that's it for stateside for today. It's just politics is straight ahead. I'm April Bear. Till tomorrow, take care.